Deliberate policy decisions have disempowered workers and increased labor market inequality: The new State of Working America Data Library shows the latest trends in productivity, wages, labor markets, unionization, and CEO pay

Below is an excerpt from a piece originally published in The Briefing Book, a Substack publication. Read the full commentary here. 

Rising inequality has been a major social and economic problem for the United States for decades. The policy agenda to stop or even reverse this inequality must start with a clear understanding of what drove it. In our view, inequality has come from the labor market, and more particularly from a range of intentional policy decisions that disempowered typical workers when they have sought wage increases from employers. In an effort to disseminate facts about labor market trends more broadly, the Economic Policy Institute has constructed the State of Working America Data Library, which allows users to easily browse and collate detailed data on wages, incomes, and employment. We hope this tool fosters a broadly shared understanding of the labor market changes we need to achieve a fairer society.

In any single year since 1979 there has been a maddening gap between what the U.S. economy could be delivering for working families and what it actually delivered. The richest country in the history of the world has routinely failed to offer broad-based economic security and prosperity through a cascade of policy failures. This gap between the potential and the reality of what typical families eke out of the U.S. economy has shown up directly in skyrocketing incomes for the richest households.

There is a strong case to be made that the 2024 economy—despite just being a few years clear of two global economic catastrophes (the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine)—had re-attained its pre-crisis performance in record time and in a way that directed more benefits to the lowest-paid workers.

Yet the anxieties driven by the crisis, the unfamiliar burst of inflation, and a decades-long legacy of typical families rightly feeling they weren’t the main focus of policymakers made U.S. households extremely sour about the economy. A fairer distribution of economic rewards in the decades before the crises might have made the public more optimistic about the rocky economic road of 2020–2024 and less willing to take a chance on the extreme policy shift that will come as a result of their election of Donald Trump.

Read the full piece in The Briefing Book.